lower? anyone? lower? lol. Cool. I was imagining myself make a DV capture rig from a used ebay laptop, and I want to go as low as possible with the speed, and make myself a direct to disk portable machine for my dvx100. Bright ideas...

I also capture with an IBM 1394 card and a Presario 1800T which is 700 MHz. Why do you want to go lower? You might be able to save a little money, but with this older laptops you will lose several things that are very important:

1. Smaller screen. These old 400 MHz and lower computers have small screens. Part of the fun of capturing to a laptop is being able to use it as a field monitor (there is some amazing software designed just for this purpose).

2. Support for larger hard drives. The BIOS in a lot of these old computers may have a hard time dealing with a larger hard disk. Not much point in the whole exercise if you get a computer that only has a 10 Gbyte hard drive and which might have problems when you want to upgrade to something bigger.

3. Rendering. I know you are only going to use this for capture, but I can tell you from experience that you will eventually find yourself in a position where you want to do some editing in the field. You will be very unhappy waiting for minutes instead of seconds when it comes time to render even a simple transition.

Bottom line: Don't obsess over saving a few extra dollars just so you can tell everyone that you have created a $200 capture device. Spend what will only be another $100-200 and get a computer with some reasonably decent specs.